Now I have no problem with any of the above. My point is merely that 4e doesn't look much different to previous editions in its lack of consistency.
Maybe, but we are gamers. Most of us know about the inconsistancies in the hit point abstraction used by D&D. We've been making jokes about them since the early stages of the game. Most of us also have played other game system that don't use hit points, and we know about the tradeoffs involved in doing so. Very few players of any game play it for long without realizing or discovering for themselves how the different sorts of abstractions fall apart in actual play. And most of us who still play D&D have made the decision that the advantages of the hit point model out weigh its disadvantages. We in practice find a way to narrate the abstraction in a way that seems more consistant than it actually is.
Let's not pretend that everyone here is stupid. This is a pretty knowledgable crowd and many of us either are game designers or could do it if you stuck a gun at our heads and said, "Rulesmith or die." When a designer uses some sort of abstraction to represent something complex - like a wound - in a way that is simple (like hit points) we are able to make a reasonably informed decision about why that was done and what therefore we think about the tradeoff that was made between realism/versimlitude and gamist concerns like speed of play and ease of bookkeeping.
The problem I think 4e has is that for most existing gamers, D&D already occupied the position of most abstract sort of system we played. Many of us earlier in our careers probably dabbled with systems like RoleMaster or GURPS (GULLIVER!) or what not that tried to do very complex simulations. And we learned eventually that there was no free lunch; that if you traded off some abstraction to have wounds and hit locations and so forth you gain other different and sometimes considerable problems. So those that stuck with D&D on the whole did so because it was as abstract of a system as we could play to achieve a particular result. There were a small percentage of players that looked at D&D and said, "I need something more abstract.", but that market has never been strong enough to support really large communities. Most of D&D's competitors try to be less abstract and more 'realistic'.
So along comes 4e and for my part my anticipation was that issues like 'hit points are stoopid' and other issues arising from poor versimilitude were going to be high on the list of things to address. Instead, I got a game system where the decision was made that round approximations of a circle on a grid were too difficult, and instead we'd just use square bursts. No, I understand the trade off being made here, but quite franklly, I DO UNDERSTAND THE TRADE OFF BEING MADE HERE. I'm not stupid. I know the D&D model has never been a perfect simulation. I left the game at one point on a quest to find the better simulation. You aren't telling me anything by lecturing me on how D&D has always been abstract.
The really obvious problem you are missing is that D&D has always been almost too abstract to play and has always been almost too close to failing basic versimilitude tests to endure. Almost too much, but, after a bunch of experimentation and alot of cleaning up the system by the 3e designers, almost but not too much. And honestly, after 25 years in gaming, I find myself coming to realize just how much D&D got right from the start and how little of its core principles need to be messed with. Those sacred cows: the didn't become sacred arbitrarily which is what I'd arrogantly thought when I was a snot nosed pimple faced DM thinking I could certainly build the better system.
4e may be building on a legacy of so abstract that it can be 'stoopid' but it went in the wrong direction. Just because I except this much crap in a trade off to get something, doesn't mean I'll accept twice as much crap to achieve particular goals which apparantly were important to the designers but which would have not been listed in my top 20 peeves with 3e.
